Game Change

by John Heilemann

  “Americans need a president that will stand up for them, not a president that looks down on them,” she said.

  THE FINAL DEMOCRATIC DEBATE of 2008 took place in Philadelphia on April 16. The event was being held in the same venue where Obama had given his race speech a month earlier, the National Constitution Center. So there was a certain grim coincidence when, the day of the debate, Obama’s BlackBerry buzzed with the news that Reverend Wright was planning to resurface. Obama was already in rotten spirits over everything that had happened in the past weeks. Now his worst nightmare was planning a comeback tour, complete with media interviews and public speeches. Terrific.

  The debate, sponsored by ABC News, did nothing to elevate his mood. The first and second questions to Obama, from Charlie Gibson, were about “bitter/cling” and Wright. The third and fourth, from George Stephanopoulos, were also about the reverend. Next, by video, a voter from Latrobe, referencing the lapel pin controversy, challenged Obama: “I want to know if you believe in the American flag.” Then Stephanopoulos asked about his association with William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground (a group that had bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol in the early seventies), who lived in Obama’s neighborhood in Chicago and with whom he was said to be friendly.

  Obama looked weary and defeated, as if he’d been beaten with a stick. He soldiered through his answers, calling the flag pin matter a “manufactured issue” and saying that inferring anything from his acquaintance with Ayers, “who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old . . . doesn’t make much sense.”

  Hillary seemed to know a lot about Obama’s ties to the erstwhile Weatherman; she noted in her rebuttal that the two men had served on a board together, citing dates and other details. Clinton’s staff was surprised; Ayers hadn’t been part of her prep. But Hillary had a number of friends—among them Sid Blumenthal, whose nickname was “Grassy Knoll”—regularly feeding her on the sly negative tidbits of dubious veracity about Obama. (In getting ready for that night, Hillary casually mentioned to her aides that she’d heard that Obama’s mother was a communist.) Her advisers tried to prevent her from spouting such stuff in the debates. But every so often, she slipped something in.

  After the face-off, Clinton was tickled pink over seeing Obama slammed so hard and on such earthy matters. Kibitzing in a hallway offstage, she told her aides, “I need you all to think about the best closing argument, what ads to go with, especially now with all this new material.”

  No brilliant closing argument would be required. Between “bitter/ cling” and Hillary’s resurgence on the trail, where her fighter’s stance grew even more pronounced and effective, Clinton had Pennsylvania in her pocket. Six days later, she trotted to victory.

  Obama took no comfort from the fact that the suits had told him all along he was foreordained to lose Pennsylvania. Hillary had killed him again among white voters, 63 to 37—and beaten him among every ideological cohort except the self-described “very liberal.” More loudly than before, pundits were saying that Obama couldn’t close the deal. Some were even starting to compare him to McGovern and Dukakis.

  Obama flew out of Pennsylvania and scheduled a meeting with his team at his house for the next night. Enough is enough, he thought. The time for change had come.

  AROUND FOUR O’CLOCK ON April 23, a few hours before the rest of his brain trust would arrive, Barack and Michelle met with Jarrett and Rouse to get their read on the situation.

  “I gotta tell you,” Rouse said, “I’m a little uncomfortable having this conversation without Axe and Gibbs and Plouffe here.”

  “I don’t know why,” cracked Obama. “I talk to them all the time without you there.”

  It had been nine months since the Edley meeting spurred Obama to draw Rouse and Jarrett deeper into the campaign fold. Since then, he’d often expressed a desire to broaden the circle further, get more voices in the room, especially more female voices. But the suits would slow-walk him, and Obama wouldn’t push it. As long as things were going fine, he was happy deferring to them, didn’t mind the narrow pipeline. When things went badly, though, Obama would start making noise again—and things were certainly not tip-top now.

  Rouse was all for more voices, but he saw a greater imperative. “You need to take more ownership of this campaign,” he told Obama. You’ve got a great team here, you’ve got confidence in them, they’ve got your best interests at heart. But what it feels like to me is that they say, Here’s our schedule for the week, here’s our theme—and off you go. I think you’re the best political mind we’ve got. You ought to be more engaged.

  At seven, the rest of the brain trust arrived in Hyde Park. Attending by phone was Anita Dunn. Everyone could see from Obama’s body language that he was tense. Instead of sitting back, relaxed, with his legs crossed as usual, he was hunched over his dining room table, his hands curled into fists, the trademark twinkle absent from his eyes.

  Look, Obama said, I have not been my best the last two months. The “bitter” thing was a huge gaffe. I didn’t perform well at the debate. My pastor was a big problem. But let’s be honest, you guys haven’t been your best, either. We’re not going to lose the nomination. We’ve come too far. But we have a bunch of challenging states in front of us, and I don’t want to limp across the finish line. I want to finish strong.

  For the next five hours, Obama and his team chewed over what was wrong and how to fix it. Obama listened to everyone’s ideas—and then told them how it was going to be. From then on, he said, the campaign would have a nightly conference call to run down what had happened that day and strategize about the next. The entire senior staff would be on the call. And Dunn, not Axelrod, would run it. Obama knew that many of his aides felt locked out of the loop by the suits, and were reluctant to disagree with them. He wanted that to end. He also wanted a nightly assessment of how they had fared in each twenty-four-hour news cycle. “We need to win every day,” he said.

  Before then, Obama had been fairly detached from the granular details of the daily back-and-forth—now he insisted on being up to his eyeballs in them. He wanted to know which surrogates were going to be on television. To see talking points and message plans. To be consulted on paid media decisions. To prescreen every ad before it aired.

  Then there was the matter of Michelle. Since Ohio and Texas, her circumstances had only grown more trying. “Proud of my country” had turned her into something of a target; even John McCain’s wife, Cindy, had taken a shot at her. (“I don’t know about you, if you heard those words earlier,” she said. “I am very proud of my country.”) Michelle worried that she was hurting Barack’s prospects, thought the campaign wasn’t protecting her sufficiently, that it hadn’t devised a real strategy for her.

  That, too, was going to end, Obama said. He wanted to see a plan for Michelle. And not just some ideas vomited verbally; he wanted to see paper.

  How long all these changes would remain in place was unclear. “I may not need this forever,” Obama said. But it was how they would be doing business at least through the next two contests—the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6.

  Obama believed that winning them both would force Clinton from the race. North Carolina, with its large black vote and high concentrations of college students and knowledge workers, promised to be relatively easy. But Indiana would be a bear. Obama decreed that they would go balls out to win the Hoosier State. Michelle would do whatever the campaign planned for her. Their daughters would even hit the trail with them for the final weekend.

  We’re all damn tired, Obama said. But we all need to get off our asses and end this thing, all right?

  A fine plan, for sure—but there was a small wrinkle. The Jeremiah Wright comeback tour was about to begin.

  OBAMA HAD TRIED TO call Wright before his race speech, but failed to reach him; the reverend had just retired from the church and set off on a ten-day cruise. Obama was aware that Wright was angry about what had happened aro
und the announcement in Springfield and disgruntled over the candidate’s words in Philadelphia. Somehow Obama needed to break through all the acrimony and misunderstanding.

  The two men arranged a secret meeting at the reverend’s Chicago home. Obama explained that he hadn’t intended to criticize Wright in his race speech—far from it. Disowning him would have been the expedient play, but Obama had resisted. He had tried to place Wright in historical context, tried to help others understand where he was coming from. Obama treated Wright as an old friend, a former mentor. He tried to raise his consciousness about the magnitude of what Wright was jeopardizing: Obama’s run for the presidency represented something far greater than either of them individually. But Wright didn’t seem either persuaded or placated.

  He listened to me, heard me out, Obama told Jarrett afterward. I had a chance to express my concerns. We’ll see.

  That Friday night, in an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Wright spoke softly as he defended himself and argued that the clips of his sermons had been deployed to paint a caricature of him. “I felt it was unfair,” he said. “I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt those who were doing that were doing it for some very devious reasons.” Moyers asked Wright about his reaction to Obama’s race speech. “I do what I do; he does what politicians do,” Wright said. “So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician.”

  Most of Obama’s advisers heaved a sigh of relief at the PBS interview—but Jarrett did not. She knew immediately that Wright’s impugning of Obama’s motives would wound her friend. And she was right.

  “How could he say that about me?” Obama asked Jarrett. “He knows that’s not true. He knows I wasn’t being a politician.”

  Personally painful as the Moyers interview may have been for Obama, it was Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club on the morning of April 28, three days later, that was politically imperiling. Posing and preening, pontificating, apostrophizing, and mugging for the cameras, Wright declined to retract his “chickens coming home to roost” comments about America’s complicity in 9/11. Asked about AIDS, he brought up the Tuskegee experiment and said, “Based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” Asked about Louis Farrakhan, he said, “He is one of the most important voices in the twentieth and twenty-first century.” Asked about Obama, he repeated and sharpened his attacks on his parishioner as a typical politician, and then added that he’d told Obama, “If you get elected, November the fifth, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”

  Campaigning in North Carolina, Obama hadn’t watched the performance live, but Jarrett, by phone, told him it was bad. Very bad. On the tarmac in Wilmington, Obama, under pressure from reporters to offer a reaction, could summon only a wan rebuke for an offense he had not seen. “He does not speak for me,” Obama said. “He does not speak for the campaign.”

  Later, on the campaign’s new nightly conference call, his advisers paraphrased for him what Wright had said. But Jarrett urged him, “You’ve got to watch this for yourself. You have to look at him.”

  When Obama did, late that evening in his hotel room, he was stunned. The first Wright eruption had filled him with sadness at the sight of his pastor self-destructing. But the sequel made him angry and indignant. With his race speech, Obama had declined to throw Wright under the bus. Now Wright appeared to be hell-bent on tossing Obama in front of a runaway train.

  A press conference was arranged to follow a town hall meeting in Winston-Salem the next morning. A few minutes before Obama would walk out and face the waiting reporters, Gibbs found his boss in a men’s room in a recess of the Joel Coliseum Annex, standing over the sink washing his hands, lost in thought.

  Gibbs had traveled thousands of miles with Obama, seen him in almost every conceivable situation. Moments of stress. Moments of dolor. Moments of steely fury. But he had never encountered Obama in a moment of profound self-doubt. Even at the lowest moments of the campaign, nothing had shaken Obama’s conviction that the country would see him in the way he wanted it to see him. See him as he saw himself. See him as he was. But Wright had stolen that certainty from Obama. His public image was up for grabs, along with the nomination.

  “Do people really believe that I think that way?” Obama said softly. “Do people really believe that his views are my views? Why would people think that?”

  Gibbs tried to reassure Obama, urged him to go out and say simply and forcefully that he found Wright offensive. Gibbs had no doubt what was at stake. The entire Obama enterprise had been based on the premise that Barack could transcend racial stereotypes, if not race itself. Now Wright—a stereotype of a stereotype—threatened to torpedo that underpinning. It was, both men agreed, the moment of maximum peril in the campaign. Obama touched Gibbs on the arm and said, “I know what I gotta do.”

  “The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I met twenty years ago,” he declared before the cameras. “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well.”

  The next six days were brutal for Obama. His poll numbers took a hit in North Carolina and plummeted in Indiana, where the campaign now feared getting clobbered. He was campaigning harder than he ever had before. But Clinton was working just as hard, and was in a groove. At high school gyms, train depots, and fire stations, she turned in performances that were sharp, energetic, and laced through with antic, even madcap, populism—vowing to “go right at OPEC” over high gas prices, attacking Wall Street “money brokers” for their role in causing the recession. Her staff was bedraggled, shriveled; Hillary fairly glowed. “She’s finally having fun,” said one of her aides.

  Obama was having no fun at all. He was consumed by visions of doom. First Texas and Ohio. Then Pennsylvania. Then Wright. Now the possibility of a drubbing in Indiana. Would the superdelegates start to think Obama was mortally wounded? That Clinton was correct that he was unelectable? Maybe we’re not going to survive, he thought.

  On the night before the May 6 primaries, Obama was in Indianapolis for a massive get-out-the-vote rally that included entertainment by Stevie Wonder. Twenty-one thousand people were there. Rain bucketed down from the skies all over them.

  Jarrett, Nesbitt, and Whitaker had come from Chicago to lend Obama moral support. He needed it, Valerie thought. Her friend seemed despondent.

  “I can’t wait to call you Mr. President,” Jarrett said, trying to buck him up after the rain-soaked rally.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to call you that, man,” Nesbitt chimed in. “You’re going to always just be Barack to me.”

  Obama laughed a little.

  “Look, man,” Nesbitt went on. “There’s nothing you can do about Reverend Wright. He’s a suicide politician. He had a plastic explosive strapped to his vest and he said, ‘I’m blowing up everybody!’”

  All of them started cracking up, mirthful tears streaming down their faces—until Axelrod walked in wearing an even more mournful expression than usual.

  Bad news, he said. The polls don’t look good. We’re down twelve in Indiana, and it’s tight in North Carolina.

  “Get Axelrod out of here,” Obama said, instantly deflating. “He’s a downer.”

  A downer, and also wrong, it turned out—with enormous implications. The next day, Obama won North Carolina by a whopping fifteen points. And while Clinton carried Indiana, it was only by the barest of margins, a single percentage point.

  From a stage in Indianapolis, Hillary made a halfhearted attempt to declare herself the victor of the night. “Not too long ago, my opponent made a p
rediction,” Clinton intoned. “He said I would probably win Pennsylvania, he would win North Carolina, and Indiana would be the tie breaker. Well, tonight we’ve come from behind, we’ve broken the tie, and thanks to you, it’s full speed on to the White House.”

  Not a soul believed her. Though Obama had failed to defeat Clinton in Indiana, he’d achieved several greater triumphs. He had beaten expectations. He had reassured the party that he wasn’t irreparably damaged goods. And, not least, he had overcome his real nemesis—not Hillary Clinton, but Jeremiah Wright. Around midnight, Tim Russert appeared on MSNBC and summed up the meaning of Obama’s trifecta unequivocally, with a single sentence that caused one set of hearts to flutter and another to stop beating: “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be and no one is going to dispute it.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Bitter End Game

  THE VOTERS OF WEST VIRGINIA didn’t give a damn about Russert’s certainty or Obama’s hold on the nomination. A week later, in the state’s primary on May 13, they delivered Clinton a victory by the kind of margin normally reserved for blowout football games: 67–26.

  Obama had wanted to play hard in West Virginia, but his advisers told him no way. There were too many “bitter people” there, they said, employing what had become their rueful shorthand for white working-class voters. Obama bridled at the ever-growing perception that he couldn’t win those voters, and wanted to dispel any impression that he wasn’t competing for them. For three nights running, he kept asking, Are you sure we can’t go? Are you sure we can’t win? Are you sure we shouldn’t even show the flag? Yes, we’re sure, Plouffe said. It would be a waste of your time and our money.

  But now, in the wake of a forty-one-point shellacking, the campaign faced the prospect of a welter of stories about Obama’s weakness with a key general-election demographic. It needed something to quash that coverage, and to show the superdelegates that West Virginia had changed nothing, that the nomination was still in Obama’s bag.